Alimardan's Mischief Reviews

7.5 of 10

Alimardan's Mischief is a simple 2D point and click adventure game with a comedy theme as you control a bratty kid that is a nuisance and causes a lot of problems. Gameplay involves clicking around on your screen to make the kid misbehave by putting down banana peels and other bratty behaviour. This game has been translated from some other language into English... badly. If this was done through Google Translate, Google Translate should feel ashamed of itself. Regardless, the language in this game is broken and will put off a lot of gamers. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, left handed gamers or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 2 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 50,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected. Alimardan's Mischief has the gamer gouging price of around $5 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam. For comparison, the $5 asking price for this game could get you games like the Tomb Raider remake, "Mass Effect 3" or "Portal 2". Yeah, Mass Effect 3, or this. Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this. There's also thousands of free, superior quality games on Steam.

commited lots of felonies as a 10 year old child 10/10 would recommend

dialogs are badly written and their english translation so bad, it literally killing game's enjoyment. main character is an ugly and obnoxious brat who has behavioral problems, he walks slowly everywhere and doing mischiefs to adults. i m not sure if this game has a substantial story but it looks like you just wander around and doing bad things to other people. Persian/Farsi voice overs sounds also quite wooden. i played this developers other games and quite liked it but this one simply not my cup of tea.

This is a point and click adventure game though I sort of use "adventure" lightly. It was developed by RSK Entertainment, an Iranian based game company. I mostly decided to purchase it because I want to support more developers from the Middle East. It's not likely to top anyone's top 100 list of games but it does have it's own... charm. The graphics are a childish 2D drawn/cutout style that I think is evocative of the childish nature of the story and character so while I wouldn't be nominating the graphics for any awards it was certainly fitting for the game. I liked that the backgrounds depicted more modern and typical sorts of views of life in Iran (as opposed to orientalist fantasy). The settings seemed fairly representative of modern day Iran's homes and towns. The animations were okay for the style of the game but not very impressive. They were however fairly smooth and well transitioned animations with no visible glitches. The background music was good, it had some tunes that I'm sure I've heard before but cannot quite place. The background musi certainly helps you to feel the Iranian flavor of the game. The voices are all in Persian/Farsi it seems so I can't attest too much to the quality of the voice acting but the sound quality was good and the story seems to be done in the form of some sort of poetry (a common element to both Arab and Persian storytelling and culture). The meter sounds good, though I understand very little of what's being spoken. Though though the game's audio is in Persian/Farsi there are English subtitles. While I get the jist of what's being said the translation quality is absolutely terrible. It's almost comically bad! Problems range from simple spelling errors, to different terms for the same thing being used, to poorly worded sentences. You'll likely understand most of it but its going to be a very awkward read. I think they may have been trying to maintain some of the poetry's meter and perhaps rhyme? But it doesn't translate well that way. It could use another pass over by an English translator or at least have an English speaker re-write the phrases so they could be better worded and understood even if it's translation of the idea more than the specific words. The story and dialogue are definitely reflective of Iranian values and culture. Unfortunately it's cultural charm are not enough to save it from a slightly unclear story line. It's not exactly clear what Alimarden is supposed to be doing though there are occasional clues as to how he should use his inventory. But the story itself is a little bland. Basically you are Alimarden and for often no good reason you just want to do bad things that make problems and get you into trouble. The first half of the game is spent destroying things being a little mean and possibly abusive to animals and making messes... the second half is spent with Alimarden seemingly wanting to make amends and cleaning up his messes and making apologies. I guess in that sense it has some morality teaching players about redemption. The interface is fairly simple there's a main menu where you can stat a new game, save a game, get instructions on how to play (basically just click on everything with a hotspot, click inventory to desired location). In game you can see all hotspots by clicking the spacebar. Items will pop up their title when you mouse-over them. Your inventory is accessed simply by bringing the mouse cursor to the top of the screen. There's also a little circle with a brain pictured on it in the upper right hand corner. I thought at first it was like a checklist of things you had to do but by halfway through the game I started to think it's actually more intended as hints if you get stuck. I think this might be one reason why I played through it so quickly. My time spent playing was probably around 1-1.5 hours making this $4-$6/hour of game play. That's pretty pricey. If you want to experience a game from the Middle East or give it a try for any reason... wait for a sale. It does go on sale frequently during steam seasonal sales. I wouldn't recommend purchasing it at full price though. When purhased cheap you might enjoy it as a quick quirky game to play one afternoon or something.